So I finally did it, with all this talk of SOPA and PIPA I have been diligently questioning how valid the movement to the cloud really is. Well I must say I owe a great bit of gratitude to the existence of the cloud. I wanted to launch a service and I had virtually no money to buy hardware and test things out in a public way. Rackspace enabled me to easily throw together a few Linux boxes on demand and voila I was deploying my code.
The service oriented architecture of things like Harvest and Jira Studio have given me access to useful project management and business management services. Without those cloud hosted services I would not have been able to take on some of the things I was able to take on last year.
Well at the end of the year it seemed like it was time to make an investment in the growth of Neosavvy. So along with some advice from a trusted colleague I began planning the new server that will host NETS and other Neosavvy services. The cost of running things in the cloud adds up. Its $1000/yr for Jira studio, and $550/yr for Harvest (5 users) and nearly $3000 / year for rackspace on 3 relatively small servers. Actually purchasing hardware and leveraging CentOS with XenServer Hypervisor has enabled me to spin up 10 beefy virtual servers and there is room for 10 more for additional processing power.
Having the opportunity to get closer to the hardware has been an absolute pleasure as well. With the cloud of course you don’t have to do any of this planning, procurement, interoperability of hardware, or systems administration. Getting the opportunity to work with it is fun and exhilarating and oftentimes the reason people get into computing to begin with. It isn’t all just about the software.
So while I don’t necessarily think the cloud is a bad place for things to get started, I do think that it is the wrong way to cost effectively grow a business. The cost of setting up services in the cloud is far greater than the cost to run and maintain servers by a trained professional. In the new year I plan to write about some of the network topology I am introducing and systems admin tricks I am leaning on to make my network provide services to run Neosavvy as a business.
2 Comments
“Actually purchasing hardware and leveraging CentOS with XenServer Hypervisor has enabled me to spin up 10 beefy virtual servers and there is room for 10 more for additional processing power.”
But what did it cost for that hardware and hosting?
Basically what is the cost/benefit comparison between rackspace’s cloud and “real” hardware.
Not that I’m arguing for/against the cloud mind you, everything has its place and the cloud isn’t the solution for everything, just wondering.
Daniel:
You ask an excellent question and for the essence of discussion I will outline how I came to the purchase decision and my budget.
Firstly summing the cost of services I paid for last year – that are now replaced by purchasing the server
3334/yr hosting (just to rackspace)
864/yr harvest (depending on user count but this is what quickbooks says i spent last year)
1750/yr atlassian jira studio (i just checked quickbooks and misquoted the amount in the blog post)
Total yearly spend: $5948
Now keep in mind the spec of the hosting was 3 boxes (CentOS with 80GB HDD and dual core processors with 2GB memory)
Server Purchase:
1U SuperMicro 24 Core Intel Xeon with 72GB RAM and 8x256GB Crucial SSD Hard drives and hardware raid controller and 10GBe card
2U QNAP NAS with 8x 2TB Seagate Constellation 3 Enterprise Harddrives
10GBe expansion for QNAP to create 10gbe connection to server
12U Rack unit to house these units and future server expansion
Total cost $16,330 – amortized across 3 years $5443/yr or assuming I get 5 years of service out of this equipment $3266/yr.
Now just by pulling my services out of the cloud I will end up saving $500/yr over 3 years. But also realize I have MUCH more capacity than I was getting and can spend money on licenses for hosting the software myself in the future and also have room to write my own services and expand my internal capabilities.
Hope this helps you look deeper into my move out of the cloud, and maybe it’ll rationalize a similar move for you if you are starting or running a small business yourself.